My personal stuff and my interest in Business Processes Management, Collaboration Methodologies and Technologies, Data Security and User Experience.
Technologies that I currently focus on are Dojo, iPhora Foundation/Touch, Linux, NOSQL, and NodeJS.

Friday, June 24, 2011

The last time I tried getting a picture of the Tower Rd power plant, my phone camera went bad. I tried again a few days ago and it was the same problem. But after a few engineering techniques ( hit the phone a few times ) my camera was working again.

The Tower Road power plant is interesting in that is on the shores of Lake Michigan in a very expense neighborhood in the North Shore of Illinois. The electricity is cheaper than ComEd, since the city controls the power plant.

MWLUG 2011 Abstract Submissions has been extend to June 30th upon the request of a number of potential speakers. So if your are interested in presenting at MWLUG, make sure you get your submissions in soon.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

I would like to give special thanks to Sheraton Milwaukee Brookfield Hotel for their generously in donating the weekend getaway package that includes breakfast for our MWLUG 2011 Community Outreach Program. It is an over $300 value. This year the beneficiary is Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin. The raffle tickets are $10 each. So if you are attending MWLUG 2011 or not, purchase a raffle ticket and get a chance to win the weekend package. You can register for MWLUG 2011 or purchase a raffle ticket at: http://www.mwlug.com/mwlug/mwlug2011.nsf/uxpages/conference.uxp?openDocument&tab=tab1

Damn IE. I have been working for months on an application that uses a lot of Dojo. It is a fairly complex application with the user interface sitting all on one page with 5 dialog box, data grids, lots of xhrPosts and xhrGets, and many other visual affects. Of course everything works on Chrome and Firefox, but it crashes on IE during testing yesterday. Now I have to spend an enormous amount of time debugging why it crashes in IE. I suspect it is the datagrid which is very sensitive.

Monday, June 20, 2011

20 years ago, Rob Burton, Dan Eitel, and I founded ReCor. It is hard to believe that it has been 20 years. For 20 years we have been provide training in the form of self-paced training to thousands of companies training millions of users through out that time. Lotus Notes training has always been our best training product out there. With the next version of Notes come, it will continue to be our best training product. Like everything else, we have also diversified in what we are doing these days and training represents a small portion of our revenue.

The funny thing is that we did not start out as a training company, but as a small development shop to do application development. Training for Lotus Notes kind of fell into place while we were working on a custom application for a client. Those days, the big thing was a IBM 486 PC. Man do I feel old. Like all businesses we have had our ups and downs, but the experience of being on my own and not working for a large firm has been great.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

As part of the Midwest community, it is important that we help our community that includes others that are outside of our Lotus community. Last year at MWLUG 2010 we raised $500 for the Cleveland Foodbank. This year we are proud to announce that the MWLUG 2011 Community Outreach Beneficiary will be Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin who tirelessly help feed individuals in the eastern part of Wisconsin. Like last year we are raffling off $10 tickets for a weekend stay at the Sheraton Milwaukee Brookfield Hotel. So come join us in helping out Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin. For more information go to: http://www.mwlug.com/mwlug/mwlug2011.nsf/uxpages/home.uxp?openDocument&tab=tab2

Friday, June 10, 2011

If you submitted an abstract for the MWLUG 2011 and have not received a confirmation email, please resubmit your abstract. I thought I had this problem fixed last year, but it seems to be happening again. I keep getting sometimes blanket submissions. I have added more test and I am recording everything that is happening in order to isolate this problem. If you are submitting an abstract, please do not use an special characters. Not sure if that is the issue. Thanks everyone and make sure you submit your abstract by the end of the month.

Monday, June 6, 2011

If IBM is dropping the Lotus name and the brand, what happens to all the LUGs and LUG conferences and also Lotusphere. Does the MWLUG become MWISC for Midwest IBM Social Collaboration and iamLUG becomes IAMISC? Does not sound too appealing.

The next GRANITE meeting is on June 13, 2011 with presentations on using social networking tools with Lotus Notes and Domino on Amazon EC2. Come join us for another great GRANITE meeting. We will also be updating everyone on all the things that are happening at the up and coming MWLUG 2011.

Went for a bike ride this morning at 6:00 AM. This is Tower Beach in Winnetka, IL. Next to it is the Winnetka power plant that serves the town. No ComEd for them. I had a nice picture showing the plant along with the North Shore beaches, but the Blackberry camera screwed up. The beach is down about 100 feet from the street level. The road is about 30% grade so it was a tough climb back up with no running start. Each year it is getting harder and harder to climb it, must be a hardware problem.

Always be Happy

About Me

I have been working with Notes and Domino since Notes 3. I have started three different companies after working as a consultant in a large firm including Phora Group, Taishan Works and ReCor. I promote the use of collaboration and business processing technologies.
I am the Past President of the GRANITE Lotus User Group here in Chicago and co-organizer of the Midwest Lotus User Group Conferences.
I focus on Business Process Management, UI Design, and Data Security. IBM Champion 2015, 2016, 2017